I 76 ENGLISH JOURNEY

remote outlying farmsteads—they look like white crumbs on
a vast rumpled green tablecloth—who, when asked by the
parson why he never saw her In Kettlewell these days,
replied: "Oh, I used to like going into Kettlewell about
once a week, but now I can't stand t'racket," And I
remember a woman who lived in one of these remote farm-
houses, a solid West Riding countrywoman and not one of
your fanciful arts-and-crafts misses, who swore that she saw
fairies dancing on the hillside. (Have these lonely folk
keener senses than ours, or do they merely take to imagining
things? It is still an open question, and not to be settled by
a report from a committee because a committee would
never see anything.) We reached Buckden, towards the
head of the Dale, and a notable goal for Bradfordians, who
have emptied the barrels at the inn there many a time; and
then we turned left, towards the long remote valley of
Langstrothdale, up which you may go to Hawes in
Wensleydale. We stopped, however,, at Hubberholme, a
tiny hamlet that had a fine little old church and a cosy inn.
There we stayed for lunch.

Once up there you seem at first at the world's end; and
indeed you are a long way from anywhere, certainly from
a railway station. It is the internal-combustion engine that
has brought such a place as this on to the map, just as it
has changed—or is changing—the whole face of England*
Before the Industrial Revolution, before the railways came,
these dales were more thickly populated than they were
twenty years ago, (Wensleydale, with its castles and abbeys
and ruined farms, must have had quite a considerable popu-
lation in the Middle Ages, whereas it seems almost empty
now.) It was steam power that brought people swarming
into a few centres or kept them close to the railway lines.
Now, after less than a hundred years of this centralising and
canalising influence of the railway, people are being spread